Amy Johnson Crow has been sharing on her Generations Cafe Facebook Group a prompt each day for May. They are based off of her book 31 Days to Better Genealogy that you can buy on Amazon (shown below).
Day 5 of 31 Days to Better Genealogy is: Survey the Area. Amy Johnson Crow talked about how different research strategies and methods apply to different areas. This is similar to doing “pre-research” before you begin researching to learn what records exist in an area, when they began, and what resources are available. It’s like making a locality guide!
The area that I probably do the most research in is Buffalo, NY as both sides of my family lived there. I am getting pretty comfortable and familiar with the records in the area, but I’ve noticed lately that I tend to focus on place-based research out of FamilySearch and not Ancestry. So, let’s go see what records Ancestry.com has for Buffalo!
On Ancestry I did a title search for “Buffalo” and received 68 results. A few of the results do not apply to the place that I was referencing (such as Buffalo, Nebraska) but the majority do see to be results for Buffalo, NY!
Some search results (that are not city directories) with the highest record count are:
- Municipality of Buffalo, New York : a history, 1720-1923
- History of the city of Buffalo and Erie County
- History of Buffalo and Erie County, 1914-1919
- The Cradle of the Queen City : a History of Buffalo to the Incorporation of the City
- History of Germans in Buffalo and Erie County, New York
- Home History : Recollections of Buffalo During the Decade from 1830 to 1840, or Fifty Years Since
- Men of Buffalo
- History of the Diocese of Buffalo
- A History of the City of Buffalo and Niagara Falls
- Reports to the Twenty-Ninth General Conference United Brethren in Christ : Buffalo, New York, May 14, 1925
- The First Hundred Years of the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce
Now I was also curious to see what MyHeritage might have for “Buffalo” and they had 2 results:
- History of the City of Buffalo and Erie County, with Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers
- Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society, Volume 6
I would have thought that yearbooks would’ve come back in a search result. Alas, I had to go to the U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-1999 collection and narrow down by browsing the collection by state and then city and found 107 of them located in Buffalo.
That was a fun little exercise and a good one to remember to mix it up some and not always go looking in FamilySearch but to remember that other websites may have different resources.